The thirst for remote jobs and freelancing has led thousands of employees worldwide, including Kenyans, into ghost Artificial Intelligence jobs posted online, a new investigation supported by the Pulitzer Centre has revealed.
According to the investigation, cited by Africa Uncensored, Artificial Intelligence companies are using mass recruitment tactics to inflate their workforce numbers without providing meaningful work or pay.
The job postings are often framed as part-time freelancing roles to help shape the future of AI.
According to the investigations, many applicants are onboarded, trained, and added to internal platforms with the hope of starting to work and earn. To their utter dismay, the applicants only find empty dashboards and no tasks available.
While others get some tasks to do here and there, others have to wait for as long as months, with zero earnings and no communication from the platforms.
According to the investigation, the companies are only interested in hiring large pools of workers to create a scenario of scalability, boosting their visibility.
‘’The evidence points to labour hedging – a tactic where companies hire large pools of workers to signal scalability, even though these workers barely have anything to do. Having more workers is seen as a sign of profitability and scale, which attracts more funding—a vicious cycle that pulls in those who believe these jobs are legitimate,’’ Africa Uncensored said.
The investigation also revealed that the companies advertising these jobs are using digital workers as collateral to win Big Tech contracts.
As of July, one of these AI companies had recorded up to 10,000 members, but many of these members, as the investigation revealed, did hardly any work.
Africa Uncensored reached out to one of the companies, whose representative explained that the availability of the tasks allegedly fluctuates.
A Kenyan who has had the privilege to land some tasks for at least five micro-tasking platforms and has trained and onboarded recruits explained that there were over 100 trainers in Kenya alone, and each trainer was required to onboard 100 recruits every week. That’s 10,000 recruits each week.
He explained that the reason for the massive recruitment was that it was cheaper for companies to actively recruit new workers than to pay those already on board for the actual work done.
